Blue could arrive through the Windows Store with Modern UI versions of Office under its arm

With personal computers giving way to other devices, Microsoft faces one of its biggest challenges after decades of absolute dominance on the desktop. Being still the undisputed leader in PCs, a market that shows signs of slowing down, the Redmond giant has arrived late to new markets that are in full upward trend, such as smartphones and tablets. Given this, Microsoft's classic strategy of licensing its software to manufacturers and companies can begin to change with Blue

Everything indicates that Blue will mark the start of a new system of annual releases of the company's main products, which will allow Microsoft to further integrate its services and respond faster to continuous changes in the market. Starting with Windows, Blue can also bring changes to Office and Windows Phone.

In the case of Windows, the company knows that a good part of the users acquired the operating system pre-installed on their computers and not buying it separately. Knowing this, the company could distribute Blue, something more than a simple system update, through the Windows Store, although not for free but at a price attractive that encourages most to update. That same price reduction would be reflected in the licenses to OEMs so that they continue to opt for Windows as the operating system that accompanies their hardware.

But Blue is not only the internal name of a Windows update, but of a set of updates to a large part of the company's products and services. The last to join the list may be Office. As reported by Tom Warren in The Verge, with Blue the expected Modern UI versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint will arrive by the end of the year The applications will have a good part of the functionalities typical of all of them and would allow access to their full desktop versions when a higher level of editing of our documents is necessary.

The batch of news about Blue doesn't end there. According to Digitimes, Microsoft would be developing Blue with the idea of ​​ somehow merging Windows and Windows Phone The goal would be to deal early with the possible dalliances of some manufacturers of hardware with Google and its operating systems, Chrome and Android. Already last February, other rumors pointed to the possibility of Microsoft unifying the Windows and Windows Phone app stores, although others point out that the merger would go more in the way of greater and better synchronization between the two operating systems.The fact is that while Windows Blue is scheduled to be released in the second half of this year, it seems that we will still have to wait a little longer for Windows Phone Blue.

Via | The Verge | WinSource